Kakao, the Korean mobile and web giant, is beefing up its social media and content businesses after its Podotree affiliate raised 125 billion won (around $107 million). The deal values it at 500 billion won, Kakao confirmed — that’s approximately $428 million. Read More

Google is disrupting yet another industry by including light-weight services directly within search results. This time, Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb, with Google testing out movie ratings from within search itself.
Google confirmed to Search Engine Land that the feature is currently just an experiment, and beyond that, the company has nothing to announce at this time.
Unlike other movie and TV… Read More

As digital assistants like Siri and Alexa become more intelligent, there’s a growing need for them to always be accessible.
Current microphone tech has been too power-hungry to keep permanently enabled. As a result, a new class of products, home assistants, like Amazon’s Alexa-enabled products and Google Home, have arisen as power-connected alternatives.
Vesper is aiming to… Read More

Innovation hubs have become a mainstay of Africa’s emerging technology ecosystem. Scratch the surface of the continent’s information and communication building blocks and you’ll likely find connections to a tech space. Read More

Facebook’s board was sued earlier this year, with investors alleging that their interests were not adequately represented when Zuckerberg was permitted to sell most of his shares and still retain voting control of the company. And now court filings uncovered by Bloomberg show that texts sent by board member Marc Andreessen are being used to suggest that he was protecting Zuckerberg… Read More

So you bought a Nintendo 3DS to play some Pokemon Sun… but now your Pokedex is complete and you’ve explored every inch of Alola. Now what?
If you’ve got a technical background, you might consider poking around the 3DS itself. There might just be a big ol’ stack of cash in it for you.
Nintendo has just launched a bug bounty program by way of HackerOne. Find a bug that… Read More

The California Department of Motor Vehicles posts a list of all the companies and entities cleared to test self-driving vehicles on public roads in the state, and that list has a new member: Nvidia. The graphics card-maker also builds processing units for use in autonomous driving systems, including those capable of deep learning.
Nvidia is working with a number of companies on the list as… Read More

Open source laptops — ones not running any commercial software whatsoever — have been the holy grail for free software fans for years. Now, with the introduction of libreboot, a truly open source boot firmware, the dream is close to fruition.
The $730 laptop is a bog standard piece of hardware but it contains only open source software. The OS, Debian, is completely open source… Read More

Droughts, climate change and deforestation are putting forests at risk worldwide, so studying these ecosystems closely is more important than ever — but it’s a hell of a lot of work to climb every tree in the Sierra Nevada. Drones and advanced imaging, however, present an increasingly practical alternative to that, as a UC Berkeley project shows. Read More

If you’ve been taking your sensitive phone calls at 30,000 feet, well, it’s time to stop. Apparently, the NSA knows about your extremely elaborate privacy workaround — putting your iPhone in the freezer is so 2013 — and can hear your calls at cruising altitude just the same.
According to a new joint report from Le Monde and The Intercept on previously unreported… Read More

Yik Yak, the once universally recognized anonymous social network that virally took over college campuses back in 2014, is planning to lay off a “significant” number of employees, first noted by The Verge. The company is said to be retaining mostly engineers as it notified its team of about 50 employees earlier this morning.
In a statement to TechCrunch, Tyler Droll, CEO of Yik… Read More

One more meetup in Poland! I’ll see you all tomorrow in Wroclaw and it’s going to be a hoot!
Tomorrow’s meetup is after the IN-FERENCE conference on Friday, December 9 and it’s part of the IN-FERENCE conference. We’ll be talking medtech, biotech and anything non-fintech related. You can submit an application to pitch here. Please note that unless you hear from… Read More

Today, Tinder is launching a new M&A branch of the company called Swipe Ventures, which will be led by Sean Rad. As part of the launch, Rad will step down as Tinder CEO and become chairman of both Tinder and Swipe Ventures, with Match CEO and Chairman Greg Blatt swapping out as Tinder chairman to become Tinder CEO. He will remain chairman and CEO of Tinder parent company Match. Read More

John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth and the oldest human to travel into space, died today at 95 years old.
Today, we join the world in mourning the passing of legendary astronaut, senator and Ohioan John Glenn. https://t.co/L66WmMJgHi pic.twitter.com/ny3NPpm0nk
— Ohio State (@OhioState) December 8, 2016
Glenn was hospitalized over a week ago at the The James Cancer… Read More

BuzzFeed has a new vice president leading its data science team.
Gilad Lotan has a long résumé in the field, having most recently served as chief data scientist at New York-based startup studio Betaworks, and before that working in data-related roles at SocialFlow, Microsoft and Endemol.
Publisher Dao Nguyen told me that this is a new role at BuzzFeed — the closest equivalent being… Read More

Today on “Today,” Sheryl Sandberg dismissed Facebook’s role in the 2016 presidential election. Still, she didn’t want you to forget that Facebook plays a relevant part in political and social movements, just not in a way that went on to influence the results of the most divisive election in modern American history.
“People come to Facebook to share what matters… Read More

The education world has been transformed thanks to the power of technology. But not all communities have been privy to the benefits; low-income students are still shut out of the edtech revolution. The digital divide is no longer just about connectivity. Many edtech startups are not designed with the specific needs of low-income, under-connected kids in mind. That’s where nonprofits come in. Read More